


You could be -

by dreforall



Series: Unintended Choice [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Choices, Choose Your Own Ending, F/M, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Period-Typical Sexism, Poor Life Choices, Unrequited Love, War, What Was I Thinking?, You Have Been Warned, canon-typical death maybe, completed already so don't worry, not a happy story because Dre doesn't do happy, or maybe not, or only mentions of violence really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 12:16:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4746182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreforall/pseuds/dreforall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robert Baratheon never thought about marriage.<br/>Until, of course, he saw her.</p><p>(May or may not be a prequel of sorts to "To live my life extended", which is to be rewritten soon-ish.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This could or could not be a prequel to "To live my life extended" - at the end, you'll understand. ;)  
> Entirely from Robert's POV. I hope I do him justice, or, at least, that version of him.

The first time he sees her she’s a blur of dark grays breaking down into a girl of three and ten, legs around Ned’s waist and arms thrown around his neck, peppering kisses on his face.

A tumble of dark hair hides her face, which takes residence against her brother’s shoulder; Ned’s half-amused, half-appalled laughs barely registers in the crisp northern morning.

Robert isn’t sure he’s ever heard him laugh like this, so truly and obviously _happy._ It’s no wonder. Robert himself _would_ be laughing joyously as well if he had a three-and-ten maid’s legs wrapped around him, ankles crossed on the small of his back and butterfly kisses on his face, sister or no sister.

 _“You’re back, you’re back,”_ she’s chanting like a prayer as she clings to her brother – a behavior more fitting for a girl half her age – for a _boy_ – and Robert thinks it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. The skin of her legs shows as her skirts rucks up; she’s wearing riding boots so well worn they put even his to shame.

“Lya, do behave yourself,” Ned tries to scold her, and fails. It doesn’t help that he’s smiling too wide to make him any more stern.

“Ah, Ned, just let her be,” he says good-naturedly.

This is when she turns to him for the first time.

Robert’s heart freezes in his chest.

Robert was always a little wild. He’s scarcely old enough to be more than half a child, at sixteen, but he’s the lord of Storm’s End and thus his name and his station in life decide his fate before he can even think of it. He’s no innocent: he has bedded women of all classes and ages and fought in brawls and tourneys alike; some say he has a child in the Vale and he isn’t entirely sure he doesn’t. He’s sixteen but already with a kill or two under his belt, the vagaries and joys of life.

But he has always been a good man as well, wildness aside (in that he’s no different from her brother Brandon, he reasons). He’s even less sure about being wedded than he is about the babe; it feels too soon, too early, but even Robert knows his lot in life. He knows, too, that wedded or not it’d be splendid to have a woman and a life and a child of his own, maybe, something he only half-remembers from his youth. A shadow of a mother, a scant memory of a father and Renly’s sweet smiles, whenever he visits Storm’s End.

(It isn’t often.)

It should be nice, he reasons, to have a family. His only family is Ned and Jon Arryn, and to be wedded into the Starks is a wondrous gift. He’s spent most of this journey north (the North’s far and so weary, so cold) hoping his betrothed was not frigid, that she wasn’t ugly or proud or catty –

( _Winter is coming,_ are the words of House Stark.)

When she turns that look at him, at the sound of his voice, that look of absolute seriousness and absolute gravity on her face, the blankness in those eyes, _that_ – they are grey, her eyes, like Ned’s, and like Ned’s they are serious, but what he sees there is something else altogether.

Lyanna Stark looks at him – no, she _sees_ him. She sees him right down to his very bones – and what she thinks of him only the gods must know, because behind the flesh of her eyes there is nothing, nothing at all.

And Robert, that is when he knows that he wants her. Wants her more than any woman he has ever known, this girl not even flowered, legs crossed around her brother’s waist, her chin propped on his shoulder, eyes cold as the northern wastes beyond the Wall. Not a hint of a smile on her face, not a word spoken to him.

She disentangles from her brother, shamelessly, and just as shamelessly drops a small curtsy to him – it means nothing, just instinctual behavior ingrained in her since youth – and says, _“My lord.”_

Robert is lost.


	2. Chapter 2

“Lord Baratheon, be welcomed,” Rickard Stark greets them from the steps of Winterfell’s Great Hall. His voice is booming, generous, a lord’s voice, fitting his grave face and grave posture and the somber, dark walls of their castle.

The Stark seat is as grey as their inhabitants, austere and – strangely – it feels quite like home to Robert. The halls, much like its people, are surprisingly warm, once you get past the dreary cold outside. Young Benjen flanks Lord Stark; Brandon is gone to visit his bride at Riverrun. Lyanna has already disappeared somewhere with Ned, much to Lord Stark’s chagrin. Robert can tell this behavior is not uncommon.

They share bread and they share salt and Robert’s led away to change from his travel clothes and into something more comfortable. There will be a feast and there will be talk, later, but for now he is in the company of wenches and maids and a young boy sent to relieve him from his armor and prepare him a bath.

Later, he’s led to the Great Hall once again, where they are to be served a feast. Robert is a great lover of food, wine and women; for once, he doesn’t even notice the delicacies, both frugal and abundant, placed before him.

To his left he has Ned and to his right he has Lord Stark. His attention is on neither.

There is nothing special about Lyanna Stark. She’s wild – that much he knows, from Ned’s fond memories and recollections of their youth before he was sent to foster – she’s beautiful as any young maid of three-and-ten is: dark hair kept loose in northern fashion framing pale skin, mostly unblemished though there are sore red spots here and there, the price of youth, he knows (and that he knows this, that he _notices_ , more than anything, alarms him), a slender figure that’s already tall for her age, the unconscious good posture of any highborn woman; even when she acts as anything but.

She dresses plainly, so unlike the southern women with their bright colors and low necklines. Lyanna’s dress is demure, dark gray embroidered in white with a hint of silver, sober and discreet as a septa’s and nothing but an equally dark choker around her neck – iron, he thinks, with a delicate direwolf head etched into it. She has a long face just like Ned’s but unlike him she smiles frequently – though it feels more like a snarl, a wolf’s grin.

Absurdly, he imagines the choker as a collar; the violent thought startles him into embarrassment.

In a strange moment he can almost imagine she _is_ a wolf, tail wagging slowly (she’s happy, but also wary) and thick fur, sharp ears drawn up and alert.

It makes him shiver. It excites him.

 _She is to be your wife, if the gods are good._ He cannot quite picture her at Storm’s End, captaining their household the way noble women are meant to. He tries and fails to imagine the girl swollen with child, those dangerous gray eyes alight with love for their little fawns.

What he _can_ picture, more clearly than he wishes ( _she’s a child, only a child, coltish and mean and half-feral_ ), is her underneath him ( _above him, but gods, would he fight her for the privilege_ ) naked skin glowing in firelight, sweat beading her skin, running between her breasts. They are small, a girl’s, but he can imagine them full as she grows and fuller still with his child growing inside her, the same child he can’t picture, and that sends a thrill down his spine.

He no longer remembers his hesitation to marry.

That night, his dreams are full of Lyanna.


	3. Chapter 3

He finds her in the godswood, back against weirwood bark. She doesn’t notice him ( _she never notices him_ ), eyes shut, seemingly asleep.

Ned’s somewhere else, called away, and he knows for a fact that little Benjen is cooped away at the maester’s tower, having his lessons.

It’s only them and her strange, foreign gods. The thrill of the hunt is back in his blood, even though he knows there is no such hunt: their betrothal is as inevitable as the northern winters.

Robert has never been more thankful for Lord Stark’s southron ambitions.

She has fine eyes: he has never noticed those things in women, more preoccupied with teats and cunts and willingness, but he does notice that on her. To him, a woman is a woman, and if she’s pretty enough, she is a challenge and a diversion; but Lyanna is not a woman.

If he didn’t know better, he’d think those old myths of the Starks turning into wolves are more than myths.

Here he is, thinking of fine eyes like a maid!

She _does_ , however. They are gray, stark gray, and storm-like; he thinks it fitting. Storm eyes for the storm lady. He thinks of his half-forgotten home, desolate and gray with the ever-present storms that give it their name, and thinks them not so unlike the North.

(His thoughts never factor Stannis, never even think of him; his sullen brother as forgotten as the child he’s left in the Vale.)

He doesn’t notice when those fine eyes open; he’s too busy daydreaming about her eyelashes and how they will flutter when he takes her for the first time.

It brings him back when she laughs; it startles him, because it’s sharp, sharper than he’s ever heard any female laughter to be.

“My lord,” she says and he would like to hear it as an insult, but can’t. The truth is, there’s no emotion whatever associated with the word, and he’s forced to realize she neither likes nor dislikes him.

He might as well not exist.

He wants to preen, to seduce, to charm, the way he always does; but there’s no opening in those eyes, no signal in her posturing, none of those subconscious cues in her.

Then, she’s gone before he can even react.


	4. Chapter 4

Normally, Harrenhal would be just another tourney, another chance to bed wenches, show his valor in battle, to drink and make merry with men just like him, but this time…

Lyanna is there.

He is the first to admit he hasn’t thought of her much, once he’s left Winterfell and back to the Eyrie, Ned in tow. Only sometimes, deep in the night, when he feels lonely. Sometimes he even dreams of her. But no, he hasn’t thought of her all that much…

… Seeing her, however…

She rides astride, like a man, and she doesn’t look at him, not even like the men, and he wants her more than he wants wenches and drink and his war hammer, and all those thoughts and daydreams come back full-force.

It’s not his fault, truly. Robert’s always been, not exactly dim, but he has never been one for deep thoughts, for philosophies and emotions; he lives in the present, and for the present – it is no one’s fault but nature’s, he reasons.

Or at least, that’s what Ned says.

And usually, he’d be talking to Ned – using him as a wall to bounce ideas from, on how to seduce the skittish, cold-as-ice Lyanna into his bed – but he’s not _that_ mad, to bounce such ideas around with the woman’s brother.

And… he isn’t entirely sure _why_. Why a girl who can’t bother to act like a proper lady, a girl who doesn’t even _look_ at him…

It isn’t the challenge; he’s never been one of those men, those who can’t resist a challenge. Sure, he enjoys the chase as much as anyone else, but not this long. It isn’t because she’s to be his wife – even less, because he knows he’ll have her anyway.

It is _something_. It is _real._

It terrifies him.


	5. Chapter 5

He sees her dancing and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

She’s a terrible dancer, and that’s why it’s beautiful because her utter _lack_ of grace, much like the freckles between her teats and the spots on her shoulders. It’s funny, because a sword in her hand transforms her – and yet such feminine task as dancing, she’s as clumsy as a green boy.

With her brothers, her father – there’s laughter and familiarity in her gaze, smiles and shamelessness. He doesn’t remember ever seeing her as relaxed, as carefree, as when Brandon twirls her around. Robert isn’t a very perceptive man, and he knows it, but he knows _people_ , and he knows that Lyanna loves her elder brother more than anyone.

(But it is Benjen who she confides in, who trains with her, who gossips and whispers secrets in the night.)

Even the dragon prince seems amused. Robert feels a pang of fondness and jealousy both as the already shy and graceless Lyanna blushes fire-red at the prince’s attention. It is no surprise, truth be told, the prince is fond of his music, his dance, and Elia Martell is too fragile to do so.


	6. Chapter 6

His amusement dies the next day, even if she looks glorious in her crown of winter roses.


	7. Chapter 7

When Brandon and Rickard Stark die, he claims it is because of revenge; before Aerys takes it into his head to murder them, too. To down Robert and Ned, as he desired, and Jon Arryn who is the closest he has to a father since Stafford and Cassana drowned at Storm’s End.

He says those things, and he tells of his claim, that his distant relation to the Targaryens is enough.

He says those things and he knows them for the lie they are. Carefully constructed lies, Jon Arryn’s plans, but lies nonetheless.

Truth is, he does not know Brandon and Rickard Stark enough to care. He loves Ned – of course he does, his best friend, his brother in all but blood – and the gods know he loves war and all it entails.

But what motivates him, what _really_ spurs him on, in his heart of hearts, is the look in Lyanna’s eyes when the dragon prince gave her a crown.


	8. Chapter 8

The crown doesn’t save him when the war hammer smashes into his chest and rains rubies everywhere. Not a crown of love, not a crown of beauty, not a crown of gold, not even the blood of the dragon.

That blood now paints the Trident red, and renames the once unremarkable shallow into Ruby Ford.


	9. Chapter 9

He was never too fond into living the namesake of their sigils; but when Tywin Lannister presents the dragonets to him, he feels as the stag that has gored his enemies – strong, proud, and very, very male.


	10. Chapter 10

Yet their deaths do not save him from the truth.


	11. A crossroad.

You have two choices.

Chapter 12 has an ending.  
Chapter 13 has another.

Neither of them is exactly what Robert wanted.  
Pick your path - and enjoy. ;)


	12. Chapter 12

She’s everything he wanted. Hair of brown, eyes of gray, and so painfully, achingly normal – it hits him right in the solar plexus, to see her like that. When they walk out of the Great Sept of Baelor, his stag-crowned cloak around upon her shoulders, he thinks _finally. Finally, our lives will begin._

She’s everything he wanted. Everything he’s fought for and dreamed of. She’s his fairytale ending; his promise.

In the end, Robert Baratheon has won; he has everything he’s ever wanted.

(And in true Robert fashion; he never sees the shadows in her eyes.)


	13. Chapter 13

At first, he can’t accept that one can win all the battles, and lose the war anyway.

“I would like to pay my respects,” he tells Ned. He is King, now. He has three legitimate children; countless more illegitimate.

He has everything.

He has nothing. He has lost.

He presses a kiss to the cold stone lips of her statue, there in the crypts of Winterfell, and counts the days until they can meet again – even if only in death.


End file.
